US artificial intelligence firm Anthropic is offering base salaries of up to £340,000 for senior engineering roles in London, pushing the capital to the forefront of Europe’s AI talent race.
According to job listings and Sifted’s reporting, senior research engineers on Anthropic’s reinforcement-learning teams are being offered £225,000–£340,000, with senior security and systems roles in the £255,000–£325,000 range. Glassdoor data show similar figures across multiple research and machine-learning positions, far above typical UK market rates. Sifted notes eight AI-engineer roles in London carry minimum advertised salaries of about £225,000. Anthropic has been approached for comment.
The hiring drive is part of a wider European expansion. Reuters reported in April that the company planned more than 100 roles across Dublin and London, led by Guillaume Princen as head of EMEA. Anthropic’s Claude chatbot has already been adopted by companies including WPP, BMW and Novo Nordisk.
The pay levels have sharpened competition. “We are starting to see the US AI talent arms race spread to London,” Ellis Seder, founder of recruitment firm Santa Monica Talent, told Sifted. Raymond Siems of benchmarking platform Ravio said the “top end of the market for technical AI roles [is] rising rapidly… led by extremely well-funded AI-first companies pushing compensation to new heights.” Sifted’s figures suggest typical senior AI pay at European startups is around £90,000–£200,000.
Anthropic’s expansion comes amid heavy investment flows into generative AI. Sifted reported the firm has been in talks to raise about $5 billion; Bloomberg, via Investing, suggested a $3–5 billion round; and Reuters recently reported a $3.5 billion financing valuing the company at $61.5 billion.
Other US players are fuelling the contest. OpenAI has announced a Munich office, while Google and Microsoft are expanding in the UK. Microsoft has detailed plans for a London AI hub focused on large language model research and engineering.
European founders are responding with academic partnerships, targeted upskilling and AI-driven recruitment tools to attract candidates when they cannot match cash offers. Many see the current squeeze as a sharp but temporary phase while US entrants reset market expectations for senior technical pay.
For the UK, high salaries can anchor top engineers and draw further R&D investment, but risk raising salary floors and squeezing younger startups and smaller research labs. Sustaining competitiveness will require expanding the talent pipeline through more doctoral places, industry–academic mobility, retraining schemes and incentives for startups to compete with strong research agendas, equity and career development.
The arrival of major AI hubs and willingness to pay top rates underline the UK’s global appeal for AI talent. The challenge now is ensuring those benefits — skilled jobs, spin-outs and research excellence — are shared across the ecosystem, not just concentrated in a handful of well-funded companies.
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